From Carter to Reagan: Resurgence of the Religious Right

The source of anti-woman bigotry in the U.S. is not the particular capitalist party in power—whether Democratic or Republican—but the capitalist order that breeds oppression and bigotry as a necessary corollary to its system of exploitation. The emergence of the religious right in the late 1970s as the ideological leaders of the anti-sex witchhunt was integrally tied to the overall political and economic interests of U.S. imperialism at the time. Coming to office in 1977, the Democratic Carter administration kicked off an onslaught of domestic social reaction and a renewal of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive to destroy the Soviet Union, garbed in the call for “human rights.” The CIA’s war in Afghanistan was a key part of this.

Carter’s domestic policies reflected the attempt of the American ruling class to overcome widespread fear and loathing of the government following the explosive years of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of the New Left, the women’s liberation movement and black radicalization, and finally the Watergate break-in that forced the resignation of Republican president Richard Nixon in 1974. For the American bourgeoisie, this all-sided social turmoil and defiance of authority were deeply disturbing, and the potential for an alliance of black militants and radicalized students with an increasingly restive labor movement was a threat that had to be stopped. Thus a major bourgeois ideological assault was launched to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome” and to instill an unquestioning acceptance of “free enterprise,” God and “family values,” including the desirability of dying for one’s country.

The Carter administration brought “born again” religious fundamentalism front and center into the White House. This was the national backdrop for an anti-sex witchhunt that cut a very wide swath: not only abortion was targeted but gay rights—for example, Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” anti-gay campaign of hate. Roman Polanski was first arrested at this time in the still ongoing 30-year witchhunt of this man. Under Reagan, all this rolled into a vicious persecution of AIDS patients, while day-care workers were targeted and jailed as “child molesters” in hysterical allegations of “satanic ritual abuse.”

As communists we oppose attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated or decreed so-called “norms.” The guiding principle for sexual relations between people should be that of effective consent—that is, nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. All consensual relations are purely the concern of the individuals involved, and the state has no business interfering in human sexual activity.